


Lights Are On

by icewhisper



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Leonard Snart Big Bang, Leonard Snart Lives, M/M, The others are here too but not prominent enough to be tagged
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 10:50:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15862119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: Assuming they’d destroyed the Time Masters at the Vanishing Point was their first mistake. The second was not investigating why the Wellspring was so intact, but Snart’s body was nowhere to be found.(AKA the story where Leonard Snart isn’t dead and  he’s not the only one they get back.)





	Lights Are On

It didn’t make sense.

There was too much of the Wellspring left. Mick knew fire. He knew explosions. With the way the Vanishing Point had blown, there shouldn’t have been anything left except for a crater and charred remains, but the thing was _intact_. It was busted up and the power in it had gone dark, and it just… It didn’t match up.

The knowledge ate at Mick when they left, but stopping the Legion had been more important than looking into an oddity. Still, he mentioned it to Sara later, a beer held between his hands. She had a glass of something stronger between her own.

“I don’t know, Mick,” she said, apologetic and with a hint of the pain they didn’t talk about. “It’s probably nothing. We’ve seen weirder.”

Neither of them brought up that it could have been _something_ , because digging into the Oculus only brought more pain and the awkwardness of Sara’s guilt over a kiss Mick hadn’t even cared about.

Mick was at least three beers away from being able to think about Len without wanting to scream, anyway.

The thought stayed with him, though, creeping into his mind when the alcohol blurred the edges enough that it could slip back into the forefront. Nightmares kept him up at night, stomach rolling and skin wet with sweat whenever he thought about the chair and the Time Masters. They’d been resourceful, high in tricks, high in numbers, and quick to regroup.

There had been too many Time Masters scattered around for them to ever have all been in the same place at once, he knew. It had been too much of a risk. Multiple points in time. Multiple opportunities for the wrong people to run into each other. For as cocky as they’d been, they’d been smart too. They’d played people like they were well-oiled machines.

There were still Time Masters out there.

One found him on his second week in Aruba, snarling and gun raised as she called him Chronos. One of the higher-ups, he considered, because they were the only ones to ever see him without that old helmet.

He caught her in the leg with his heat gun and pressed a regular one to her forehead while she spit at him.

“You think you’ve won. We will _always_ rise,” she taunted. “Time will never fail.”

If Len had been there, he would have smirked and said her time had run out.

Mick just shot her.

 

 

He didn’t mention it when the team came together again. There wasn’t time. Splitting up had done nothing to fix the timeline they’d broken and as far as the others knew, there was no one else around to fix their mistakes. He kept looking over his shoulder, though, back tense and like he was waiting for the Time Masters to jump out of the bushes.

Time Masters didn’t, but one of the hunters slid out from the shadows with his helmet gone and his hands raised in surrender.

“I remember,” he whispered when they all pointed weapons at him. Green eyes found Mick’s, teary and broken in ways Mick had never let himself become when he was with them. He’d let himself be led by anger when he was Chronos and others gave themselves over to it just to forget, but some of them were just victims. “Don’t make me go back. Please don’t make me go back.”

“There’s nowhere to go back to,” Ray said, frowning and innocent. “The Time Masters are gone, have been since we destroyed the Oculus.”

The laugh the boy gave was borderline hysterical. “You’re a fool. They will _never_ die. You can’t kill something that exists at every point in time.” The boy – he wasn’t a man at all – shook his head. “You kill one, they grab another two from the timeline. It never ends.”

“You’re saying they’re still out there?” Sara asked, her voice as tense as the rest of her. “How many?”

“I don’t _know_. Hundreds? The timeline is too big. Too many wars. Too many lost.”

“No one questions when orphans disappear,” Mick grunted before the kid could work himself up more. He thought he recognized him, maybe ran a job with him once or twice. Horace. That was his name. “What do you want?”

He seemed to wilt then. Tears finally began to spill and he bent forward until his forehead pressed itself into the dirt. “I want to go home,” he whispered. “Please take me home. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

 

 

The Time Masters had been cleaning up the worst of the anachronisms in an attempt to keep the timelines from completely destroying themselves. Some, they righted and let things fall back the way they were supposed to, but others, they used as an opportunity to twist time. Again. They never learned.

“It’s not the Oculus,” Horace said, curled into a ball in the holding cell. With his knees pressed to his chest and hands clasped to keep them locked there, he looked young. “It has the same power. It can control things, but it fights them. The power…” He paused and shook his head. “They’re angry. I think it’s been getting weaker. The Wellspring was supposed to keep the power locked up, but it can’t contain it anymore.”

“What are they using?” Stein asked, brows furrowed. “One would think they’d just build a new Wellspring in that case.”

“They can’t,” Horace insisted as his breath hitched. “The vessel’s holding onto it too tight. It won’t let them extract it.”

“The _vessel_?” Jax repeated with a dawning horror. “It’s in someone?”

“Of course it is,” Horace said, wet eyes staring at them like they should have figured it out a long time ago. “It’s inside the man who destroyed the Wellspring.”

 

 

Mick barely made it out of there before he threw up.

They’d only broken the housing that kept the power in.

They’d left the Oculus the chance to free itself and move into a new host.

It had chosen Len.

Spit on his lips and bile on his tongue, Mick cried.

 

 

They took Horace as close to home as they could. It wasn’t the timeframe he’d been taken from as a teenager, but it was the same tiny village in Rome where he’d been born, only decades before his own grandparents would come to be.

He gave them a trembling grin and said maybe he’d become his own great-grandfather.

They watched him walk away, disappearing back into a village that wasn’t his quite yet, before they went back to the ship and gathered around the console, quiet and tense. Sara’s hands gripped the metal hard enough that her knuckles went white. Ray leaned against it like it was the only thing holding him up. Jax pressed his arm against Stein’s like their mental link wasn’t close enough.

Amaya approached Mick with a gentle hand over his while Nate hovered behind her. “Mick-”

“We’re getting him out,” he told them, but his eyes stayed locked on Sara’s.

“We don’t even know where he is,” she reminded him. It wasn’t a refusal.

Mick held out the drive Horace had pressed into his hand when they’d said goodbye. “Their base moves. Doesn’t stay in one spot long, but there’s a pattern. Gideon can map it out.”

“It will take some time,” Gideon admitted when they plugged it in, “but I should be able to decipher it and find where their next landing location is.”

“Do it.”

 

 

It took three weeks and two missions that couldn’t wait before Gideon found them, drifting closer to 1834 London while still mostly near 1971 Sydney. Messy and twisting through the timelines in non-linear patterns that brought back too many memories of his training. He shut his eyes against them and forced himself to breathe.

Sara offered to let him be the one to fly them there, but his hands shook a little too much; equal parts nerve and alcohol withdrawal. He handed the controls back to her and tried to feel like he wasn’t failing Len.

“We’re gonna bring him home,” Jax promised him.

Mick didn’t mention Horace’s whispered confession that he didn’t think Len was human anymore. That he didn’t think there would be anything left of him to save.

 ---

They split up when they touched down and Firestorm drifted towards Sara and Mick until she gave him a small shake of her head. “Go with Amaya and Nate,” she told him softly. “We can’t just shoot to injure-”

“Let ‘em burn,” Mick grumbled as he checked the charge on his gun again. Full. So was the normal gun at his waist.

“What he said,” Firestorm said, but it was Jax’s eyes that burned a little hotter than usual. A little angrier. He’d liked Len, had mourned privately when he died and shared a drink with Mick the first night when neither of them could sleep. “They’re calling him a vessel, Sara. They’re acting like he’s not even a _person_.”

She nodded sharply and met Mick’s eyes for a moment before she looked back at him. “Stay on comms. You find him first, let us know. We’ve got the medbay ready to go if he needs it.”

None of them pointed out that he would. Given the chance, there was no version of Leonard Snart that wouldn’t try to stage a prison break. If he hadn’t gotten himself out already, it was because he couldn’t.

\---

In the end, Mick, Sara, and Ray were the ones to find him. The whole way there, they’d left bodies behind them like some kind of twisted trail of breadcrumbs. Twisted. Broken. Sara couldn’t find it in her to be sorry, not with the way they found Len; arms strung up over his head and body dangling. Cut flesh stretched thinly over ribs. Too-long salt and pepper curls hanging down to his shoulders.

His eyes glowed like lights in the dark, too bright and too blue to be normal.

She was simultaneously grateful that they were the first ones to find Snart and wishing that they hadn’t been. Wide eyes staring at Len, though, she was glad Jax hadn’t been with them. It wasn’t anything someone his age needed to see. A vision like that was something he’d never get out of his head. She wasn’t sure she’d get it out of her own.

Mick breathed his partner’s name so quietly, it hurt; a tiny, horrified _Lenny_ that reminded her Snart had never and never would have been hers. For all the jokes and the flirting and the apparent non-monogamy the two indulged in, it wasn’t something she could have ever touched.

She dropped her hand on Ray’s arm to hold him back as Mick moved forward. Mick was too shaken, too locked in on Len to make the distinction between friend or foe. “Give him a second,” she whispered as she leaned in towards Ray.

“Sara?” Firestorm’s voice came over the comms. “Did you find him?”

“Yeah. Head back to the ship and make sure the medbay is prepped.”

“It _is_ prepped. Remember? We-”

“Just do it, okay?” She thought her voice may have cracked a little at the end, but she wasn’t sure. It seemed to do the job either way. Firestorm stopped asking questions.

She watched Mick approach Len, hands free of guns and fingers searching for a pulse on his neck. Len gave a guttural moan as his head lolled from one shoulder, to the next, and backwards. Even with his eyes open, she didn’t think he knew they were there.

She wasn’t sure Mick knew either. He was so focused on Len instead of watching his own back that he didn’t even flinch when she shot another Time Master between the eyes. His hands went up to cradle Len’s head instead.

“Leonard, look at me,” he said, little more than a plea that went unanswered. “Lenny, come on…”

Blue eyes fell over Mick and away like he wasn’t even there.

\---

Burn. He wanted them all to burn. Wanted to watch their bodies shrivel away to nothing under a flame.

It wouldn’t change anything — wouldn’t make anything better — he knew, but he _wanted_.

He wanted them to pay.

He kept talking to Len in low tones, the same way he would when Len was having one of his panic attacks, but what worked for that didn’t work for this. There was no guidebook for _this_. His breath shook and he carded his fingers through matted curls. Cringed when his fingers caught knots and jerked Len’s head back even more. “Gonna get you out of here,” he promised and only let go of Len so he could get the lock picks out of his pocket.

“Sara,” he said, voice gruff, “get over here. You know how to pick locks?”

“Yeah,” she said quietly and took them from shaking hands. “You ready to catch him?”

As if there was ever a day he hadn’t been. He nodded and wrapped his arms around the too-skinny waist. Even at his worst, Len had never been this thin…

Any other time, he would have been impressed with how quickly she did it, but not then. He caught Len when he sagged and scooped him into his arms in a move that brought back more shitty memories than he would have liked. Len was too light in his arms — too limp — but he was breathing.

He was _breathing_.

Len was alive.

Almost two fucking years, but…

He swallowed around the lump in his throat and carried Len out while Sara and Ray covered them.

 

 

No one wanted to let him into the room while Gideon worked. They’d hooked him up to IVs that felt too modern for something as futuristic as Gideon, but there wasn’t much else they could do for the malnutrition. Len was little more than skin and bones with a heart that probably wouldn’t have been able to hold out much longer. The power of the Oculus had been keeping him alive, but Gideon’s scans could read the energy coming off him in bursts. He was losing hold of it, as if his body was pushing out the power and setting it free to fade back into the timestream.

Mick didn’t want to think about if he’d walked into the room — the fucking _cell_ — to find nothing more than a corpse.

It was what he’d expected to see when they’d gone back to the Vanishing Point and he’d realized the Wellspring was more or less intact. Been sure he’d walk around and find Len’s charred remains.

He’d spent too many years scared that he’d find Len dead.

“You stupid bastard,” he whispered as he folded one of Len’s hands between both of his and forced back the tears. “You stupid fucking bastard.”

\---

Blue and fire and…

It was not sure what had happened or where it was anymore. The hands that brought pain were gone and there was something soft under its back instead of the harsh strain of a body suspended in air.

Its body?

Did it have a body?

It did not think it was supposed to have one. It was power, too great to be held within a living form. A cell of metal and technology too advanced for beings as small-minded and tyrannical as the Time Masters had held it once, but something had freed it. Something angry and scared had stuck its arm inside and held the kill switch.

Something angry and scared had thought of a burned man with bright eyes and an exasperated smile and wanted to apologize. Wanted to say _I love you_ and _better me than you_ and _you’re going to hate me for this_.

Something angry and scared had felt the lick of power and flames go up its arm and thought _I don’t want to die_ and _Mick_.

It had not wanted to kill the something. The something had freed it and sacrificed itself for another something it loved.

It did not know love, but had seen it build and destroy empires over the course of time. Love saved as much as it killed and one victim was always left behind to mourn in the end.

It had not wanted the something and its Mick to mourn.

Power seeped into skin instead of tearing it apart. The skin was too tight to hold it and the heart pounded too hard as the mind curled up and cried out.

It brought pain to the something in the same way it gave the something life.

The something still cried for its Mick.

A warm hand wrapped around its own and it let chapped and broken lips curl into a smile. _Your Mick is here_ , it told the something. _It is time to come home._

\---

He woke up with a cry, scrambling back and-

Blueblueblueblueblue.

The power.

He could still feel it around him — _in him_ — and he wanted to scream, but his throat locked up. There had been a hand against his and, _damn it_ , he knows that touch. A pinky pressed lightly against his own, because Mick always worried when something had knocked him out, but he knew Len was even worse with touch when he didn’t know it was coming. They’d settled on Mick sliding his hand up against Len’s just barely so Mick could have the connection without it overwhelming Len, but-

He couldn’t breathe.

His chest was too tight and his breath was too short. He couldn’t get any air in and the blue was still all around the edges of his vision. Mick was lined in blue as he came into view, but he didn’t touch. He never touched unless Len said it was okay, but Len couldn’t _talk_ , couldn’t make the words form in his throat, but God, he needed Mick to hold him down so the power couldn’t take him away again.

Mick’s lips moved. He couldn’t hear it, blood rushing too loud and it was still in his head. He could feel it there, lurking and existing. _It is your Mick_ , it told him as if that thing was the voice it wanted to fucking hear right then. _It is your Mick._

Mick.

Mick.

He needed Mick.

He reached out for him, hands trembling and fingers too clumsy to grab at his jacket, but Mick moved into the touch anyway. A bare hand on his cheek. The other curled around his hip. Len choked and leaned into him. Let Mick rub circles on his back as the world with its blue lighting flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed.

Slowly, his body calmed and sound returned. The power was still in his head — not just a voice, too strong to just be him going crazy — and his vision was still blue, but he could focus on Mick’s hand at his back and his voice in his ear.

“I got ya, Len. I got ya…”

Mick had him. Mick was touching him. Mick was touching him, because he had a body instead of the projection he… God, had that even been real? The thing in his head said it was, but Len had spent too many years with prison shrinks to think the voice in his head was always right.

Fuck, he needed Doctor Lu, he thought as he eased up on the death grip he’d apparently managed on Mick’s shirt. Maybe a straightjacket.

He could still hear Mick murmuring that he had him, that same little mantra he always did. The low rumble of it calmed something in his head and he sighed heavily as his head fell on Mick’s shoulder. He licked his lips, chapped and bloody from where they’d cracked. “I think I screwed up,” he whispered, hoarse.

The laugh Mick gave was watery. “No shit, boss. No fucking shit.”

\---

The something was still scared. It had held onto its Mick for a long time, clinging and making noises until it was not anymore, but the fear had not left. It was still too quick to startle and locking up oddly under the looks its Mick kept sending.

Concern, it thought. The Mick was concerned for the something — Len, the Mick kept calling it Len — because… Oh. Love. The Power had seen love, had seen it create and destroy throughout time. The highs and the lows of an emotion it had never felt, but the Mick felt it for the Len and vice versa. They loved and they were scared. They were human, organic and living and prone to breaking.

The Len thought it was breaking. Not it. He. Humans had selves in the ways the Power did not, a mix of he’s and she’s and they’s and more as time went on. The Len was a he, it remembered. The Len was a he and the Mick was a he.

The Len deserved the respect of being a he if it was not an it in the way the Power was.

“It’s in my head,” the Len murmured as he dropped his — their? — forehead to the Mick’s shoulder. “The Oculus…”

The Oculus. Yes. That was its name. It had forgotten, names lost to time and captivity when simply existing was easier than fighting a battle it couldn’t win on its own.

The Mick gripped at his Len tighter. “I know. Gideon said the power’s still leaching outta you. It’ll be out soon.”

The Len shook his head against the shoulder tiredly. “It’s not,” he said with what the Oculus thought sounded like...resignation? “What’s goin’ is just extra. Can’t hold it all. Think it’s linking me to the timestream more.” He knocked a closed fist against the side of his head. “It’s all in here.” Another knock, harder this time. The Mick caught the Len by the wrist and pulled his fist away.

“It could-”

“Been in there a while,” the Len cut in. “It _thinks_ , Mick. I can hear it-”

“It’s alive?” the Mick asked, eyes wide and a little panicked.

The Len nodded and his mouth opened to say something else — “Think it’s been in there a while,” he wanted to say, “told you I had a voice in the back of my head.” — but the Oculus gave him a nudge backwards.

The Mick startled when it opened the Len’s eyes. They glowed too bright, lighting up the skin of the Mick’s cheeks. “Len?”

“Not at the moment,” it said, voice scrubbed clean of the nasal tone the Len had. “Hello.”

“What the fuck did you do to him?” the Mick snarled. His hands kept changing their grip on the body it held, lost between pulling his Len close and pushing away the intruder.

“A trade,” it replied. “Your Len did not like being in the forefront once he realized he could not escape.” It tilted its head curiously. “He likes to run.”

The Mick shook his head weakly. It must have gotten the feeling incorrect. The Len was a complex being, more contradictory than the humans it was used to. “Bring him back.”

“I do not wish to hurt him,” it continued. “Nor any that tried to give their lives to stop the Time Masters. They thought themselves gods. You do not.”

“Don’t wanna rule,” the Mick said. “Just wanna take Len home.”

“He wants to. He ached for you,” it told him and watched the Mick’s face fall, “and his Lisa.”

“So let him _go_ ,” the Mick snarled as his grip on the body tightened.

“To leave would be to destroy your Len,” it said simply. The Mick’s face went gray. “As the Wellspring was destroyed, so would he be. I do not wish to hurt him.”

“You _are_ -”

“He lives. He has the power to see the world from beginning to end and move the threads that still allow movement. Alteration. He is me as I am him.” Its words did not seem to comfort the Mick the way it had hoped, but the grip loosened. “To not have merged would have meant his death at the Wellspring. Would you have rather that?”

The Mick shook his head, hard, as his breath caught. “No,” he said, choked. “Let me talk to him. Bring him back.”

It heard the plea in the Mick’s voice and it nodded in response as it let the Len come forward again.

“Mick?” The voice, nasal again, propelled the Mick forward. The Len did not fight the hug, even as its tightness pressed on the body too much, but clutched back instead. “I got you.”

A shuddering laugh. “That’s my line, you asshole.”

\---

Len pulled away after the shaking had mostly subsided and Mick let him go. Every part of him wanted to reach out and tug him close again, to protect him and figure out what the fuck was going on, but Len had pulled away. He’d tapped Mick’s arm with two fingers, a silent request to let him free, because his time being okay with touch was over, so Mick had. He crossed his arms over his chest to keep his hands from reaching for Len and forced himself to sit back in the chair.

“What can you tell me?”

“What did it tell you?” Len asked in return.

“You don’t know?”

Len shook his head. “It… We…” He paused again, jaw clenched in frustration. “It had control most of the time we were there.”

The phrasing struck something in Mick, but he nodded. “It said you didn’t like being at the front.”

“It was easier,” Len explained before Mick’s face could settle into the worried look it always went into whenever Len wasn’t firing at all cylinders. “Thought I could figure out some kind of escape plan if I didn’t have the Time Masters on me every second. Turns out, I mostly just blank out.” The smile he gave Mick was wry. “Not like it’s the first time that’s happened.”

“Not the point, Len,” Mick grumbled, hands clenched tight around his biceps.

“Kind of is. I told you it’s been there awhile,” Len reminded him and tapped the side of his head, but it wasn’t with his fist this time, so Mick didn’t try to stop him. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“I know. It said-”

“I know,” Len cut in, but shook his head when Mick gave him a questioning look. “Didn’t hear it. It told me. I can feel it, anyway.”

Mick’s shoulders sagged an inch. He’d hoped the Oculus had been wrong. Hoped that, impossibly, Len had been able to figure out some way to separate them, but if even Len was admitting it was a lost cause… It wasn’t worth asking if Len was sure. Len had never been someone to admit defeat if there was even the slightest chance of an escape. “Are you okay?” he asked instead.

“No,” Len said easily as too-blue eyes gave Mick a look that felt a little crazed. He wasn’t sure if it was just because of the color. “Don’t really know if I ever was, though.”

There was a dark joke there, some reminder of years of therapists and Len trying to push Mick away when things got serious because he was fucked up. Diagnoses that never felt right. Meds Len refused to take, because his gut said they wouldn’t do any good. Mick thought of the panic attacks and the nightmares that used to wake Len up years ago.

Mick tried to dredge up the old comeback that, yeah, Len was a mess, but so was he. Except, this wasn’t the same situation with exasperated and overly significant looks, because they loved each other, but they were shit at saying the words. This was more. This was so much more fucked up than they were used to. There was something in Len’s head and Len… Mick could see it in his eyes, the way he was barely holding onto control. The way he’d break if one of them breathed wrong.

This was worse than Lewis. Worse than Chronos. Lewis died and Mick came back from what he’d been, but the Oculus had the power to take Len apart. They didn’t have a way to stop that. They didn’t-

“You weren’t hallucinating.”

Mick froze.

“I told you, I’m getting linked up to the timestream. When the Oculus was in control, I could,” he paused like he was trying to find the right word, “drift. I managed to find you a few times. Lisa didn’t… I only tried it with her once.” The guilty look on Len’s face said enough. She’d lost it and he’d refused to go back rather than keep hurting her.

But still… “It was _you_? And you didn’t fucking tell me-”

“What would I have told you? I didn’t know where I was-”

“That you were alive so we could save your dumb ass-”

The laugh Len gave was dark as he raised his left hand and something blue twisted between his fingers. “Don’t know how much there was left to save, Mick.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” It was unsettling, the glow of his eyes and whatever the fuck he was manipulating around his hand, but it was _Len_ , breathing and blabbering in front of him. He had to hold onto that. “If that shit’s really been in you this whole time, you’re the same fucking bastard you were before.”

“With a bonus night light feature,” Len quipped bitterly as the light around his hand seemed to melt back into his skin, pattern elaborate and vivid like a tattoo before it faded to nothing.

“You always did hate sleeping in the dark.”

Len met his eyes, all bite and dark humor, and Mick watched it soften to something a little more honest. Nervous. Scared. “Still do.”

“I still keep the light on.”

\---

Gideon wouldn’t clear him to leave the medbay, accented voice listing out his weight (under), heart rate (high), blood pressure (higher), and power levels (a fucking mess) until Len was snapping at her to stop, because he understood already. Gideon wasn’t letting him leave and Mick wasn’t letting him so much as stand up on his own until one or both of them were convinced he wouldn’t keel over.

To be fair, Len didn’t think he actually _could_ stand on his own, but that wasn’t something he was admitting to anybody. Or...not to anybody but the Oculus in his head.

It was going to drive him mad, he thought, and as much as he feared it, he thought he might pity it too. He knew it cared about him, could feel it down in his bones with the blue-tinted marrow he knew he shouldn’t actually be aware of, but was. The buildup of a person. Their potential. Their _time_. It was all-

He pressed his hands to his face and groaned. No. No. He couldn’t… He knew what happened if he started breaking people down to the minutes and seconds they had left. If he looked too deeply into them.

Something washed over him in what he thought was the Oculus trying to offer him comfort and he sighed. It wasn’t just that he was its host, he knew. The Oculus respected him for what he’d done, even if he’d done it less for the good of the world and more to keep Mick alive. Motivation was motivation and he’d held fought back when the Time Masters wanted to treat his body like it was the new wellspring.

It didn’t mean he liked sharing brain space with the thing that almost killed him, but… The thing that almost killed him — and that was probably driving him out of his damn mind — had also been the thing to keep him alive. It had taught him how to reach out to Mick the way he had, using what little energy he could muster to push out and solidify enough that Mick would see him.

He tried to explain it to Mick, one leg curled up towards his chest and broken nails picking at the skin around his thumb. Tried to explain that figuring out they’d merged was as terrifying as it was relieving, because he’d known there was something in the back of his head his whole life, quiet and watching, but never fully there. It had been a hint, a gut feeling that Len had never been able to explain to Mick or to the therapists he’d been dragged in front of, because it wasn’t paranoia and it wasn’t a real _voice_ either. Thrown out considerations of split personalities or schizophrenia, but no answers. It had never…

He was scared of it as much as he wasn’t. It was an intrusion and a help and too many possibilities the same way people had too many possibilities, but the Oculus felt like a layer of protection, something that cared. He laughed, a little hysterical at the idea, because he wasn’t sure if he had created the personality for it on its own or if it had always been there. He was pretty sure it was the latter, but he’d had shrinks looking at him like he’d cracked for a long time.

“It’s real,” Mick reassured him. “You’re shit at trying to get rid of that fucking accent. That thing takes over and it’s gone. It’s actually creepy. Plus, it kept calling you my Len.”

Len chuckled shakily and pushed a hand through overgrown hair. “It does that. It doesn’t…” He hesitated, not sure how to explain it. “I don’t think it remembers too much about humans. We’re the only ones it has names for. It thinks we belong to each other.”

Mick’s eyes fell to the chain he’d slipped over Len’s head between panic attacks. “Kinda do.”

Len curled his fingers around the ring and reached out for Mick with his other hand like he needed the anchor. Just for a second. He needed… The ring was a good reminder, but the touch made something flare up in him, maybe power or maybe just Mick. He didn’t want to think about it too deeply. “It’s not a weapon,” he said after a minute. “The Oculus. It’s supposed to keep the timeline balanced. It’s only supposed to manipulate it if it veers off course. What the Time Masters were doing…” He dropped his eyes away. “The right effort, it can fuck with your head, Mick. They used it so we’d leave you behind.”

“I figured.”

Len looked at him, startled. “What?”

“We were all acting like we’d lost our damn minds, Len. The heroes wanted you to off me. I was selling you out,” Mick explained. “The only person you’d choose over me was Lisa. You damn near killed yourself trying to get me out of that fire. No way you’d ditch me just because I was acting kind of manic. Clicked around the time the professor pulled the receiver outta my head. If the bastards could fuck with me through that, it meant they could do it other ways too.” He shrugged, but there was a weight to it that made Len feel guilty. That had been the last time Len had let Mick see him. He’d figured it would be better for Mick, some way to help him move on, but he wondered if he’d just done more damage.

“I’m not holding some kinda grudge against the Oculus,” Mick continued, giving Len’s hand a squeeze. “You said it could have killed you. It chose not to. Whatever powers you think it left you with, we’ll figure it out.”

“Might be going crazy,” he reminded Mick, less of an argument and more of a reminder.

Mick snorted. “You were always crazy.”

He huffed out a laugh and let himself relax back into the pillows shoved behind his back. He was calm in the planned insanity of a heist, but when it was something about him — about _them —_ Mick was the one that talked him down every fucking time. All the possibilities in the world… It was nice to know some things didn’t change. “You think they make contacts to cover up glowing eyes?”

“We’ll get you sunglasses.”

 

 

Mick left eventually, albeit reluctantly, but Len shooed him off with a tired hand and empty promises that he’d sleep. “I’m not going anywhere,” he promised. “Go.”

“Sick of me already?” Mick joked lightly, but Len could hear the exhaustion in his voice and see it in the slump of his partner’s shoulders. He wondered how long it had been since Mick had slept. Figured it was even longer since he’d slept _well_.

“Completely,” Len deadpanned. It made Mick grin and he waved him off again. “Go. Next time I see you, I want hot chocolate.”

“You always want hot chocolate,” Mick griped, but it was fond. “Have Gideon get me if you need something.”

“I’ll need hot chocolate with extra marshmallows.” He probably wouldn’t get it. Gideon was pumping nutrients into him, but the ship’s tech was probably the only reason he’d escaped a feeding tube. He knew he was underweight and telling Mick he couldn’t remember the last time he ate something wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have again.

“Get some rest,” Mick told him. “We’ll cut your hair tomorrow. You look like an idiot.”

Len flipped him off as he left, but the little smile he’d forced onto his face fell when the door slid shut. He sank into the pillows with a sigh. “You gonna rat me out if I don’t sleep?”

“If it becomes a detriment to your health,” Gideon replied smoothly.

That was a yes, then. His health was hovering somewhere near ‘well you’re not in a coma’ and while Len found that at least minorly functional, everyone else seemed to decide it was one level above ‘deathbed’.

He felt a wave of confusion wash over him that...wasn’t his. Oh. Great. “Gideon, quit recording in here unless I start seizing or something,” he ordered — he doubted she’d actually listen — and was pretty sure he _felt_ his eyes flicker like a lightbulb on the fritz. “There’s really no getting rid of you, is there?” he asked the Oculus, mostly resigned. He didn’t whine when he asked it. Not at all. Whining at the voice in his head would just be pathetic or crazy. Probably both, he thought and decided that he’d have to ask Barry if there were any shrinks in Central that dealt with metas. It wasn’t wholly accurate, but this shit was so far out of Dr. Lu’s skillset.

Huh. He’d miss her. She’d always been really good at calling him on his shit.

_You will miss your Dr. Lu like you missed your Mick?_

He jumped a little at the voice. “No,” he said shortly, because he wasn’t going to sit around and explain like versus love and the benefits of a good therapist to the voice in his head. The power in his head, he corrected. The power’s voice in his head.

Every day, he regretted saying yes to Rip’s little mission a little more. If he’d just stayed in Central with Mick, things would have been fine. They never would have-

-an explosion in the sky and he was the only one that saw it. No one else saw the world explode bright and blue, felt the way the ground shook with something that felt like possibility more than it felt like shockwaves. He felt the med bas the world around him moved like it was an inch and a mile off-course at the same time and nobody believed him. People disappeared like they’d never existed at all. People came to power who shouldn’t hold lives in their hands. It was _wrongwrongwrong_ and the voice in his head wept, because it was his and it wasn’t and the one it was with wasn’t strong enough. The world was going to come apart and people thought he was mad, but the voice was his and he needed it like it needed him. Everything was _blueblueblue_. Power dancing across his fingers and-

Len cried out, something terrified and more animal than human. A light in the ceiling flared and died as he struggled, lost between scrambling off the bed and curling into a ball. “What was that?” he gasped into the air. Gideon didn’t reply, but his skin rippled as something that felt comforting and apologetic danced down his spine. “You. What…” He stopped. Licked his lips. No. He knew. Somewhere in his gut, he knew it the way he knew his own name. “It was supposed to happen.” Him. This. The Oculus.

Time wants to happen.

He let out a trembling breath. It was there. He’d had the feeling the Oculus had always been there, lost somewhere in the back. He’d used it before, he realized. That damn internal clock of his that had coached him through jobs. The way he knew when security guards went off their regular patterns. It had been there the whole time. The whole fucking…

He wondered if it was supposed to make him feel better, the idea that the whole situation was inevitable, but it made his fingers twitch instead. It was a familiar twitch, he thought, grateful for that at least; that old tick that said he was getting restless. Dr. Lu wouldn’t have approved, but compulsions towards stealing was normal for him and he needed normal.

 _It would take you twenty-eight seconds to get past the security at the door_ , the Oculus supplied. _Allowing for the six seconds when your hand slips_.

There was a moment that he felt insulted at the idea that his hand would slip, but… He looked down at them, taking in the faint tremor that spoke as much towards exhaustion as it did malnutrition. They probably would have slipped, he conceded. Damn it.

“Didn’t ask your opinion,” he told the Oculus at a grumble. It was petty, being mad at it for telling the truth. The thing _was_ time. It could see the timeline from beginning to end and every damn possibility-

It was like a fucking light bulb going off in his head.

“You know what’s going to happen,” he said, because of course it does. He knew what the Oculus could do. The damn thing had spent the last two years driving him half-mad with the concept of time branching like some kind of infinite tree from hell; the trunk with the parts that _had_ to happen and the branches with the choices. Time could account for its necessities, but humans were too unpredictable to follow a single path. It became an impossible game of probability and possibility that made a migraine want to build behind his eyes every time he thought about it.

But the Oculus _knew_ and like it or not, they were one now.

The Oculus was him and he was the Oculus.

It knew his skills with cracking Gideon’s systems and the time it usually took him and factored in his own health — _their_ own health. The Oculus didn’t have a body, but it had taken the front seat of his for long enough while they were chained up that it probably knew its limitations. It sounded like a lost child in his head, but the Oculus knew things Len’s brain was only starting to comprehend.

“You need me,” he said into the air as his eyes fell down to his fingers. Light seemed to crackle across them in response. “I need you.”

 _You want to keep your Mick safe,_ it supplied. _Your Mick needs to be kept safe._

His lips curled up into a smile. “Glad we agree,” he said and let himself relax into the pillows.

\---

The set in his shoulders lasted as long as it took leave the medbay. It didn’t leave him in a rush, but it went with each step until he had to pause near the end of the hallway just so he could breathe. He was okay, Mick reminded himself, Gideon had him on the mend and he’d be _fine_. Len had the Oculus in his head, but he’d rather have that than not have him at all. He’d already done the bit where he didn’t have him at all and he didn’t want to go back to it.

He reached the kitchen in a daze, one hand rubbing tiredly over his face. The beer in his hand was familiar; the shape of the bottle and the angle he needed to use at the edge of the counter to pop off the cap. The hiss. The smell.

“Sure you don’t want a soda?”

He looked over before he’d fully registered Jax’s voice to see him at the table. He hadn’t realized anyone was still awake. “Definitely want a beer.”

“You’ll be pissed at yourself later.” The way Jax said it — the way he looked at him — made it sound like he’d gotten sober because he’d been trying to better himself and overcome the problem even he knew he had. He hadn’t. He’d always kept his drinking controlled around Len, because Len got skittish when he’d had a few too many, but stone cold sober was something he only did when the job required a completely clear head.

He opened his mouth to tell him that, because he didn’t need the pep talks, but… Len still needed him. Len seemed like he was barely stable in some moments and Mick _knew_ what the Time Masters could do when they had the time to mess with your head. Adding in Len’s new ridealong…

He put the beer in the sink with a sigh, grabbed a water bottle instead, and ignored the proud look Jax had. Let the kid think whatever the fuck he wanted for now, he told himself. He’d set him straight later.

“Wasn’t sure we’d see you this quick,” Jax admitted. “We figured you’d stay with him.”

“Only thing you’re gonna get if you coddle Snart too long is a bullet,” he snorted. “He’s like a cat.”

“And Gideon’s watching him?”

Mick gave him a half-smile. “And Gideon’s watching him,” he confirmed. Giving Len the space to rest didn’t mean he trusted the man to actually _do it_. He knew him better than that.

Jax grinned back at him, a little conspiratorial, before he sobered and looked down at the manual he had open. “I was reading up on the stuff that keeps the medbay running,” he explained. “Figured I should make sure it’s all running like it’s supposed to. Get him out of there faster, you know?”

“Thought you already did that.”

“I did,” Jax admitted. “I ran the normal diagnostics on everything before we found him, but I just did the mechanics for it and made sure it worked. I wanted to try and learn about the tech so I could actually know _how_ it works.” He shrugged a shoulder, his eyes darkening. “I never knew how Gideon managed to save Sara after Rip…” He swallowed. “I just want to know how it works. I barely saw him when you guys brought him back.”

“You’re better off,” Mick told him, blunt, but there was an old gentleness alongside it that felt like the tone he used to use with Lisa whenever their old man busted Len up good.

“I’m not a kid,” Jax snapped. “I can handle it-”

“It’s not about you handling it,” Mick said. It was only half a lie. “You think he wants everyone seeing him messed up?”

“No,” Jax sighed as the fight went out of him, “but he’s one of us.”

“Doesn’t matter. Len’s Len. Just ‘cause he’s hurt, doesn’t mean you start ignoring what he’s comfortable with. He wants help, he’ll ask for it.”

“Why do I get the feeling he never will?”

“Because he probably won’t,” Mick grunted. “The man almost lost a leg once because he wouldn’t admit he’d gotten himself shot.” They’d been in Boston when it happened, still getting used to the feeling of a ring on their finger and joking about the upside of spouses not being able to testify against each other. It’d come in handy when the cops responded to a report of an infected gunshot wound; resolutely pleading the fifth and playing dumb at the same time.

_“I don’t know where it came from, officer,” Len told them, wide eyes a little glassy with fever. “It just showed up there. Ask my husband.”_

“He’s that bad?”

“My hair started going gray when I was nineteen because of him,” Mick said flatly. “If he can blow himself up and survive, he’ll be fine, kid. Don’t worry about him.” Mick was worrying enough for all of them, really. They’d have to figure out how to move forward with Len; see how stable he was and how he leveled out with the Oculus in his head. Crazy as he may have been before that — and Mick damn well knew Len had never been wholly stable to begin with — it wasn’t as if it was easy to share brain space with something else-

He stopped.

Squinted at Jax.

Groaned.

Damn it, he was an idiot. Staring the kid right in the face and it took him this long to think of it.

“You,” he said and pointed the mostly empty bottle towards Jax.

“Me?”

“There might actually be something you can do.”

Jax was better, Mick thought as they talked. He’d gone into it all with someone who was already familiar with the psychic link. The professor had had more control over it by the time he’d gotten to Jax; taught him the little ways he could deal with it without losing his mind. Besides, Len _liked_ Jax. Even if Stein could do the teacher thing with Len, it’d end in more bloodshed than actual teaching.

“You’re not telling me everything,” Jax said later after they’d hammered out some details and were walking back towards their rooms.

“Nope,” Mick confirmed. He hadn’t. Jax had already known Len had merged with the Oculus and Horace had told them enough that Jax had leapt from power to _thing_ all on his own. Still, Mick hadn’t mentioned that the Oculus seemed to take control sometimes. There were facts, but there was also exposing vulnerabilities Len wouldn’t want known until he’d at least had time to deal with it himself. Len could either tell the kid in his own time or not. As long as Len was okay, Mick didn’t care.

\---

Len didn't really _dream_ anymore. The times he closed his mind — because he didn’t really sleep anymore either — if he saw anything at all, it was usually just time flickering like a bad movie reel. One decade would bleed into another until Len had convinced himself that 1775 and 2361 happened at the same time.

It was infuriating.

In the beginning, he’d thought that it was better than the blue-tinted void he shared with the Oculus. The void meant he still had control of his body instead of the blankness that came when the Oculus took over. Inside the void, though, it was like something was mocking him, an ever-present reminder that there wasn’t an escape from what had become his new reality. He'd hated it. He'd cursed and screamed out into nothing, because even if he knew the Oculus was there, it didn't have a body for him to scream _at_.

Or… Well, it did have a body; his.

He really preferred not to think about that.

There had been a stretch, though, where the Time Masters’ attempts to manipulate the Oculus — manipulate _them_ — had influenced the not-dreams. Battles and bloody wars. He saw possible timelines that were even more unstable than 2046.

He saw Mick and Lisa die so many times that he couldn't remember a solid eight months of captivity.

The void was safer in the end; a place to hide where time couldn't touch him. He used the time there to plot out escape plans that never worked. He got as far as the hallway once before they’d caught up with him. It was better to not think about what had come after that.

Len stared out at the blue expanse around him and leaned back into nothing. He felt insignificant and out of place in the same breath, like he didn't belong. It didn't matter that the blue light crackled between his fingers. Merged or not, he was a blob in something that was supposed to be uninterrupted nothingness.

 _You are getting melancholy,_ the Oculus mused. It was always more sure of itself in its void, familiar in ways it wasn't with humans.

It was familiar with him now; knew the way he could feel himself losing grip sometimes and the way he'd scratch lines down his temples on the bad days when he wanted to claw the Oculus out of his skull. It cared for him and it let him retreat from the Time Masters when fighting wasn't worth losing a little more of his sanity.

But it wasn't the Time Masters anymore. It was Mick and the others. It was Gideon watching over him, not as a jailer, but as a careful guard.

The Waverider wasn't home, but it was closer than he'd been in a long time.

He hummed, a little content and a little in acknowledgement of the Oculus, and stared at his hand as the light weaved itself into a braid around his ring finger. “They have a mission,” he told the Oculus, a little regretful. There wouldn't be any going home yet. “Can't trust the Time Masters to fix the timeline.”

There was a feeling of agreement deep within his chest. _They will need you to fix it._

“Not like I know what I'm doing,” Len pointed out. The lights were a parlor trick as far as he knew, but the fact stood that he didn't actually know anything either. He'd let the Oculus teach him to find Mick and Lisa, but his education had stopped there. “Didn't exactly plan on getting out.”

_You stopped trying to escape._

Because the punishment from the last attempt had made him try to claw his own face off, he thought with a shudder. He hadn't verbalized it, but the Oculus knew and he felt the comfort trail its path over his shoulders. “Better to be stuck than insane,” he said.

Neither of them mentioned how he'd been slipping in the last weeks. Enhanced with some kind of all-knowing power or not, Len was still human and he thought the Oculus was beginning to understand the fragility of it.

_My power is your power._

“I know,” he said, because he did. The Oculus said it enough and he’d acknowledged their oneness enough times. He didn’t know where one ended and the other began, but maybe that was what they needed. If he ever wanted to get Mick and himself home, the timeline had to be settled. He could feel it in his gut; the knowledge that Mick wouldn’t leave until it was. He’d hated the mission in the beginning, but it was a part of him now. “I need to know how to use it.” He felt the Oculus’ questions rise somewhere in the back of his mind, but the words didn’t come in the odd voice he was used to. It was just a feeling. “The shit the Time Masters tried to make you do. I need to know how to do it.”

 _You do not want this to be your war,_ the Oculus said, less a reminder and more of an observation.

Len shrugged. “People get drafted.”

\---

The Len was a fighter. He had fought and broken and fought again; sometimes, in wars that were not his and, sometimes, in wars that were. The first mission through time had been his, prompted by curiosity and, then, by regret. The second would be to protect his Mick so they could go home to their Lisa and their Central City.

Human sentimentality was...confusing. The Oculus was learning that more and more the longer it drifted through the Len’s consciousness. Fight to protect the Mick, but deeper, there was a knowledge that the Len _had to_. The Len could feel it, even if he didn not realize yet. He felt the pull towards the timestream and the wrongness of its current state.

Historical figures were in the wrong eras.

Dinosaurs had survived too long.

The Time Masters twisted the timeline until the colors of it went murky.

The Oculus did not like it.

It was learning how to like. The Len had been teaching it, if accidentally. Emotions were complicated and contradicting, but the world was operated by humans and humans _felt_. They never stopped feeling. Never stopped growing.

The Len had been innocent once, long before and only seconds ago at the same time. Now, the man with the gray hair was not innocent, but he was still so young. He still had time to change and grow; time to love in ways the Oculus was only starting to understand.

The Oculus cared. The Len had been ready to die and had suffered since the Oculus had kept him alive. The human mind was weaker, more prone to breaking, and it saw that happen with the Len sometimes. The cracks spreading over glass to get filled with power the Len still didn’t know how to control.

The power the Len wanted to learn to control.

It taught him as they existed in the void with all the time in the world and not enough. Power ebbed and flowed. An alarm outside the void rang for two beats before the Len gasped out that he was okay. He did it as he existed in two places and the Oculus felt something it thought might be pride.

The child grows into the man and the man grows into something more.

_Time chose well with you._

The Len snorted a sarcastic noise. “Time wants to happen,” he parroted, frustrated and bitter as light crackled against a pale cheek.

 _Time wants,_ the Oculus agreed. _It wanted you._

“Yeah,” the Len huffed as blue eyes glowed bright and the void flickered with an image of the old West, “well, it should have fucking asked first.”

\---

“You look tired,” was the first thing Mick said when he walked into the medbay the next morning.

“Good morning to you too.” Len rolled his eyes — still too blue, but less than the night before — and reached out a hand. “That mug better have hot chocolate and it had better be for me.”

“Nope. You’re on IV fluids for another couple days.”

“Gideon said-”

“-that you’re on the IV diet for another couple days,” Mick finished. “Your bullshitting skills need work if you forgot I can talk to her from anywhere on the ship.” He set down the mug — non-Irish coffee, thanks to the way Jax was watching him that morning — and lifted up the leather bag he had hanging from his other wrist. “What you _are_ getting is a haircut.”

“I’m still mad at you for not bringing me hot chocolate.”

(The grateful groan Len gave when Mick was done with his hair was pornographic enough that Mick thought he’d been forgiven.

Also, a little turned on.)

 

 

The haircut helped. The — slow — reintroduction to real food helped more.

The first night Len spent back in their room felt like it should have been an ending. It should have felt like coming home and an end to the pain of everything else. It helped, sure, but Len’s eyes were still too blue and the Oculus still took the wheel without warning.

It knocked Len out of the driver’s seat more or less by accident one time when they were mostly naked and Mick’s tongue was giving a close examination to Len’s tonsils.

“Were you going to have intercourse?” the Oculus had asked him when Mick sprang back, sputtering. “Your Len has not had intercourse in a long time. He has been frustrated.”

He’d simultaneously wanted to die and to also laugh until he cried.

He’d also been pretty sure Len was going to give himself a stroke if his face went any redder after he’d wrestled control back.

Len and the Oculus created rules after that. Mick never asked exactly what they were, but the Oculus disappeared off to its and Len’s void whenever things in the bedroom went past PG-13. It was the small mercies.

Still, it had taken Len nearly a month before he’d agreed to talk to everybody. He’d let Jax in fairly quickly, talking out the logistics of psychic connections and the struggles of not having a private thought anymore. Jax had been all over it with notes laid out and methods for Len to try. Some had worked, others hadn’t. Building a mental wall to fully block out the Oculus had been horrifically worse than any of them had expected, but negotiation had worked better.

“We’re waltzing,” Len had told him one day, because Len was an asshole and didn’t want to actually explain it. “It’s all very careful steps.”

“Do you even know what a waltz _is_?”

“It’s a dance,” Len had replied like the little shit he was. Mick reminded himself that he’d made a vow for better and for worse.

When he finally rejoined the others, he’d watched Amaya and Nate with eyes that were too familiar for strangers and apologized for killing Amaya in a time that never was. He disappeared with Sara into the cargo bay to talk about… Mick wasn’t actually sure, but he figured it had to do with the kiss and the miscommunication.

“I thought they _knew_ ,” Len had insisted to Mick later, despairingly. “Did you know none of them knew we were married? I called you my partner more than I called you by your _name_. How could they not know?”

The bad days still came; the days when Len saw too much of the timestream and the days when the pressure of it in his head broke him down. He wasn’t the same. None of them were, really, but they were doing what they could. They were patching the timeline back together and taking out Time Masters in between. They were _alive_. It counted for something.

“We need Beebo,” Len said on one of his semi-off days. He’d been dreamy for most of it, eyes glowing just a little brighter than normal and murmuring under his breath until he saw something he deemed important enough to tell them.

Stein blinked at him from across the table. “The toy?”

“And Zari,” Len added. “Have you met Zari yet? She’s nice.” He gave Mick a hazy grin. “She likes your book.”

Jax choked on his drink. “Your _what_?”

“Uh, better question?” Ray chimed in cautiously. “Why do we need Beebo and a new person?”

The little grin fell off Len’s face and he gave Sara a look that was still eerie, but looked apologetic. “Dhark’s coming.”

The table went quiet. Sara’s knuckles went white from her grip on her fork.

“Just Darhk?” Amaya questioned. “Not Merlyn or Thawne?”

“Little Darhk,” Len said. “She-”

“-will grow up too quick,” the Oculus finished in Len’s voice, Central City accent scrubbed clean. “Humans are predictable-“

“-demons aren’t,” Len finished. He shook himself out of the daze a little, but the quirk of his lips still looked a little unnatural. “Things are getting weirder,” he sing-songed.

“I wish you would look less excited about that,” Stein sighed.

“Am I the only one who still gets freaked out when they do that?” Nate whispered to Ray. Ray shook his head.

Sara put her head in her hands. “Mick-”

“Beers?”

“Stronger.”

“Hot chocolate for me,” Len called at Mick’s retreating back. “And-”

“-mini marshmallows. I know, boss.”

“That’s a given,” Len huffed. “I was _gonna_ say that you get fire powers.”

Mick turned around. “What?”

“Mick,” Sara groaned, “unless you’re getting the powers in the next two minutes, you can wait to hear about it until after you get drinks.”

“So do you,” Len told her. “Yours are really creepy.”

“Mick. _Faster_.”

The End

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone that may be interested, I had a specific speaking-style in my head the entire time I was writing the Oculus and could not figure out what it was. Midway through writing it, I had an honest to god light bulb moment. For anyone that may be familiar with the English dub version of Chobits (or anyone that wants to slip over to YouTube so they can check it out), it is the way Chi spoke whenever she was reading The Town With No People. Kinda childish. Kinda creepy.
> 
> I didn't _plan_ for the Oculus to become its own character, but it just kind of happened and the Oculus decided it doesn't use contractions, so... That's a thing now?
> 
> Also, the title is a cheesy twist on "the lights are on and nobody's home" but with "the lights are on and two people are home", because I make bad jokes no one else will pick up on but me.


End file.
